Monday, November 5, 2007

Rock Concert Raises Money for Fire Victims

Serge Belongie, a UCSD Jacobs School computer scientist (pictured above), and his rock band, SO3, held a benefit concert for fire evacuees at the 710 Beach Club in Pacific Beach.

His story (below) and other stories of how the UCSD community pitched in to help out during the recent wildfires was told by Ioana Patringenaru in her This Week @ UCSD Story.

Belongie told This Week @ UCSD that the performance made his band take a fresh look at some of their lyrics. “Look to the east and tell me what you see, that rising sun ain’t what it used to be,” one of their songs goes. While they rehearsed that song, they looked up and saw that the sun had turned into a bright-red disk, just like during the 2003 Cedar Fires. “There was something apocalyptic about that,” Belongie said.

The concert, which included another UCSD band --Audition Lab -- raised $165. Intuit, the employer of SO3 guitarist and UCSD alumnus Mike Artamonov, matched it, increasing the total amount raised to $330. SO3 and Audition Lab are now planning a benefit concert Nov. 10 in New York. Audtion Lab features UCSD computer science and electrical engineering graduate students Carolina Galleguillos, Luke Barrington and Antoni Chan, and two New York bands.

“There’s just so much support from New York, they’re really aware of what’s going on,” Belongie said.

Earlier in the week, he had taken in Artamonov, SO3’s guitarist, who had to evacuate his Rancho Bernardo home. Belongie himself had to leave his Sorrento Valley home for a few hours.“It could have been us that lost our house,” he said. “It’s that simple. That’s the closest it’s ever been for us.”

SO3 and Audition Lab played a show on the UCSD campus at the end of the Spring 2007 quarter. You can read the stories about the show here and here.